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Colleges' use of high-school GPA mulled

By Michael Hartwell, mhartwell@sentinelandenterprise.com

Updated:
11/04/2013 06:35:13 AM EST

GARDNER -- Massachusetts has a paradox to solve. The state regularly leads the nation in its math scores in national assessments, but its high-school graduates are often unprepared for their first college math class.

At Mount Wachusett Community College on Tuesday, the state Board of Higher Education voted to give all public universities and colleges the option of using high-school grade-point average, or GPA, to determine which students need to take remedial classes. This pilot program follows recommendations from a task force charged with transforming the remedial math classes in public universities and colleges. That recommendation came with criticism from some college math instructors.

Carlos Santiago, senior deputy commissioner for academic affairs for the state Department of Higher Education, said there is a big disconnect between what students are taught in grades K through 12 and what they need to understand to tackle college math.

Massachusetts public colleges and universities use Accuplacer, a suite of tests, to determine which incoming students are prepared for their first college math class that gives course credits, which is referred to as a gateway class.

Traditionally, students who are not ready for a gateway class have been placed in remedial classes, which are referred to as "developmental education" courses. These classes are supposed to get students ready to take a gateway class, but they tend to be unpopular.

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"It's expensive for students. They don't get credit, yet they're paying for it," said Santiago. He said it eats up time that they could be using to take a credit-bearing course.

"We're concerned that the remedial courses are not preparing them very well," Santiago said. "If you have two students and both don't place well on a placement exam and one takes a remedial class, they perform pretty much equally in that first credit-bearing course."

The state's Task Force on Transforming Developmental Math Education looked at 11,000 Massachusetts community college students who took a remedial math course in fall 2010. Of that group, 9,000 have yet to pass a credit-bearing course.

Santiago said part of the problem is the Accuplacer is inaccurate in who it assigns to remedial classes. He said the public university system of New York has had a lot of success incorporating GPA into the placement process. Students with GPAs of 2.7 or above in high school tend to be better prepared for their first math class.

"The evidence looks pretty compelling," he said.

He said department officials are looking at a total abandonment of Accuplacer but want to try using total GPA as a starting point, with tweaks for students with high or low math scores or AP math credits. Those who look like they would have trouble would then take the Accuplacer, while those with generally high GPAs would not.

Santiago said that instead of taking remedial courses, many schools have had success with using modular instruction. He said students who fail remedial classes have to take the entire class over again, leading many to drop out instead of going through the same difficult course one more time. Modular instructions, however, are micro-courses done on targeted subjects. They are completed at the student's pace.

Instead of being a prerequisite to a math course like remedial classes, Santiago said modular instruction can be a co-requisite done at the same time. He said this takes a lot of work from instructors to design their classes with modular support in mind, but it eliminates the major problems with remedial courses.

"What we're suggesting is that the institutions also experiment with taking that first-year math course, but simultaneously do remediation," said Santiago.

Worcester State University math professor Richard Bisk is critical of using GPA in placement and the task force's report. He is the former Mathematics Department chairman at WSU and Fitchburg State University. Both he and his current department wrote letters to the state criticizing the task force's recommendations. He said they have their hearts in the right place by trying to solve the math-skill shortfall but believes they could end up doing more harm than good.

Bisk read the studies on using GPA in math placement cited in the report the task force submitted to the Board of Higher Education at last Tuesday's meeting. He also contacted the study's author and said they misread the research and may have missed that the sample size was extremely small. He's concerned that using GPA for placement will misdiagnose too many students.

He said that the correlation they found was between GPA and placement, not GPA and grades in gateway classes. A weakness of the study he found is that the study lacked the actual grades from gateway classes and estimated them by extrapolating from the placement scores. He said there are many other factors in a student's ability to pass a class left unaccounted for.

Bisk said that sort of extrapolation is like noticing the temperature is 30 degrees in the morning, 50 degrees a few hours later and concluding the temperate would be 140 degrees at night.

He said people may wrongly assume that they are using the GPA from math classes when the pilot program the state just accepted allows public colleges and universities to use total GPA.

Santiago said there are other studies that support using GPA to sort students, and the studies are based on cumulative GPA, not just from math classes.

Bisk also rejected the task force's comparison, in which nine of 11 remedial students from fall 2010 have yet to pass a gateway math course.

"This shouldn't be a big surprise for anyone," said Bisk.

He said it's expected that students placed into remedial courses have a higher dropout rate than other students.

"That is a loss rate that is just unacceptable," said Santiago.

Bisk defends remedial math classes and said WSU's use of them was not carefully considered by the task force. He said the biggest difference with WSU is that the school has a different culture around remediation courses, making sure students don't see them as punitive or degrading. Math skills atrophy over time, and WSU encourages students to take them as soon as possible.

The school's placement exams are similar to modules in that that students take targeted lessons in remedial courses, instead of needlessly long and comprehensive ones.

"We want them to take the (placement) test seriously," said Bisk. He said those changes have decreased by half the number of students put into remedial classes and brought those students' success rates from 30 percent up to 80 percent.

Bisk, Santiago and the task force all said that lowering the standards for public colleges and universities is not an option.

"The state needs to have more graduates to be competitive in today's economy," said Santiago.

He said the gap between the number of college graduates in Massachusetts and the number of jobs requiring degrees is estimated at 50,000 in 2018.

"We need pretty much every student to succeed," he said.

Bisk said modern culture is afraid of math, and people make too many excuses to avoid learning about math. He said elementary-school teachers are often ill-prepared to teach math because they don't value it. He compared learning math to how coaches make their players do pushups.

"I've never seen a football player do a pushup during a game," said Bisk. He said some lessons, like pushups, are intended to strengthen skills in general.

Melissa Fama, vice president of academic affairs at Mount Wachusett Community College, said her school supports the Board of Higher Education's decision to grant schools the option to use GPA in determining math placement. She said they are currently figuring out the logistics of incorporating GPA into placement at MWCC.

In addition, she said MWCC used a grant from the New England Board of Higher Education to implement Khan Academy into remediation. Khan Academy is a series of free Internet educational videos already available to the public.

MWCC has also used modular instruction, tutoring and computer-based alternatives to remediation classes.

Fitchburg Public Schools' Assistant Superintendent Paula Giaquinto said they are already doing plenty to help their students avoid remediation in college by being well-prepared when they graduate.

That includes using Massachusetts Math Science Initiative grants to double the number of Advanced Placement classes offered. She said they had about 170 students in AP classes two years ago and now the number is closer to 400. The high school also has deals with Fitchburg State, including dual enrollment classes and a honors academy program for freshman. If those students maintain a certain GPA they will get automatic acceptance into FSU's honors program and be eligible for additional scholarship money through the university.

In addition, Giaquinto said adoption of the national Common Core standards will help encourage additional alignment with K-12 and college math.

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